In this episode of The Candice Malcolm Show, host Candice talks to Kian Bexty, the first person in line to ask Mark Carney a question at the post-debate press scrum, and how it went.
00:04:23.320In your estimation, was Justin Trudeau a good prime minister?
00:04:27.960Yeah, Justin Trudeau and the previous administration made a number of contributions to this country.
00:04:36.440I suspect since I have 10 minutes, I think, right, for the responses, I'm not going to enumerate them all.
00:04:42.360I'll make one point which I think is relevant on the way looking forward, which is, as I said the other night in an interview,
00:04:49.960he and I, we share the same values in terms of solidarity, taking care of one each one another.
00:04:56.200The emphasis on reconciliation, emphasis on equality of all Canadians and building a better country for everyone else.
00:05:04.760The difference, one of the differences, there are many, but one of the differences between the two of us goes to the question I was just asked,
00:05:10.840which is I put much more emphasis on the economy, on growing the economy.
00:05:15.160In fact, in this circumstance that we're in, given the scale of the crisis and what needs to be done,
00:05:20.920I would say a relentless focus on growing the economy to work for all Canadians.
00:05:25.720Some say the bubbles in an aero truffle piece can take 34 seconds to melt in your mouth.
00:05:30.440Sometimes the very amount you're stuck at the same red light.
00:06:14.920And that in and of itself was newsworthy because it's like, okay, so she's not differentiating herself from Joe Biden.
00:06:20.100And I sort of got that from Carney last night that he, he knew that he should say, no, uh, he knew that he should say distance myself from Trudeau because everybody hates him.
00:06:29.160Um, but he couldn't because he believes in so many of the same things as Justin Trudeau and he holds the same values and he wants everyone to know that he's equally as left-wing as Justin Trudeau.
00:06:38.600And so to me, that was just such a fantastic, wonderful question.
00:06:42.280What, uh, what was your response and reaction to that?
00:06:45.080Well, I, I did ask a follow-up where I sort of detailed how, well, okay, you think he's great.
00:06:50.380And it, it, it, it sort of shows because you've kept all of his teams surrounding you, uh, you've kept the guy that released, um, you know, uh, uh, uh, uh, released Paul Bernardo from maximum security prison.
00:07:06.600Uh, you've made him your chief of staff.
00:07:10.680He made the person who made his life's work, the carbon tax, Stephen Gilbeau, his Lieutenant in Quebec and Terry Guion, Justin Trudeau's media enforcer.
00:07:19.780Who, I don't know if he's going to be staying along, uh, around very long.
00:07:23.600I've heard rumors that he might be on the way out, but for now he's, uh, he, he's Mark Carney's media enforcer.
00:07:30.500So he has this full team, uh, front and that's, I mean, those are the, those are the higher ups.
00:07:35.080His entire cabinet and caucus all the way down are almost identical to Justin Trudeau.
00:07:40.560So the question really is like, sure, the leader might've changed, but you know, the, the, the caucus doesn't change their beliefs.
00:07:49.680He's not changing their belief system.
00:07:51.700Leopards don't change their spots as they say.
00:07:54.060And, you know, Justin Trudeau had these guys walking in lockstep with him.
00:07:58.240They were, they were his biggest fans for a decade.
00:08:01.180They're not just going to be like, oh yeah, now we need to get serious about the economy.
00:08:04.500Uh, now that Mark Carney's the leader and we're going to leave all of this crazy garbage that the country hates, like the carbon tax.
00:08:10.480You know, even one of, I was going to get to this, if I could have asked another question, one of, uh, one of Mark Carney's candidates said yesterday that she couldn't promise that the carbon tax would never come back.
00:08:21.740Meaning that, yeah, it's paused for now because it's electorally unpopular, but just you wait, give us a majority.
00:08:29.080And in year two, we're going to go back to the same old garbage that we've been doing for the last decade.
00:08:34.900There really is no difference between this liberal party and Justin Trudeau's liberal party.
00:08:38.760It's just that this guy has a new smile.
00:08:41.740Right. Okay. Well, we have the second clip.
00:08:43.240So this is Kian Bexley's follow-up question.
00:08:45.580You're given one question, one follow-up.
00:08:47.300And here is where he details similar to what he just said.
00:08:50.180Now, the interesting thing from me, Kian, is again, Mark Carney's reaction because he hasn't really clued into the fact that you're not part of the media guard.
00:08:57.620Like, I think he just probably assumed that any journalist ever asking a question has been screened by the CBC.
00:09:01.860Their questions have been vetted by his campaign, so he's never going to get a new question, specifically not a big night like tonight.
00:09:33.360And yes, pay close attention to the hot mic with Kian and Carney's sort of bewilderment that someone was asking a question that he hadn't been pre-approved from him.
00:09:44.700Your entire campaign does seem to be predicated on putting you in the front and hiding the people that stood in lockstep with Justin Trudeau for the last 10 years.
00:09:54.360You're kind of hoping that Canadians won't connect the dots that the people standing behind you in your caucus walked in lockstep with him.
00:10:00.520Regardless of what you say right now, Stephen Gobeau made the carbon taxes life work.
00:10:04.760The man that moved Paul Bernardo from a maximum security prison is now your chief of staff.
00:10:09.540I'm wondering how you reconcile this and how you can trust their judgment when they thought those ideas were good ideas.
00:10:14.760I'd say a couple of things to that rather odd question.
00:10:18.220First is that the candidates in this election for the Liberal Party, I mean, you go and see when I make an announcement.
00:10:26.400I don't think I've seen you at any of them, but next time you can come.
00:10:29.340And you will see a wide range of the candidates that are there presenting themselves.
00:10:35.560So, for example, with respect to our announcement on crime, we had Bill Blair, now the Minister of Defence, of course, formerly the chief of police and a long time in Toronto.
00:10:46.780And Natalie Provo, who is a new candidate, we're honoured to have her, and someone who's dedicated their life to helping to end gun violence and violence against women.
00:10:59.980There is a very wide range of candidates that have come to the party with me.
00:11:06.420There's also a lot of experience that's there.
00:11:08.560And you need that combination of energy, new ideas, experience, and a fundamental passion for making this country better in order to serve at this crucial time.
00:11:30.580I put it on X at the time because I said, I think he just gave you an invitation.
00:11:34.220I think you should try to use that to get in because the thing about Carney is he's trying to be likable and he's trying to be reasonable.
00:11:40.800And again, I don't think that, like, his staff adequately warned him that at the leaders debate, independent media are allowed to ask questions.
00:11:48.440And so he, I mean, his answer is interesting, too, because he was trying to emphasise the new blood.
00:11:53.360And I think he named one candidate that was new and then also named Bill Blair and basically tried to emphasise, like, that he is different.
00:12:00.780And then, yeah, just in that little kind of, like, back and forth between you, he seemed, like, friendly to the idea that you should be able to come to his events, which makes me think that, to your earlier point, maybe it's not even Mark Carney that's banning you and other independent media from his events.
00:12:14.680It's, like, the Trudeau holdover staff that are, like, so ingrained in this idea that conservatives and independent journalists are the enemy and that under no circumstances can they get anywhere near a leader.
00:12:27.800Yeah, I'm going to have to take him up on that offer and go.
00:12:33.900I have a feeling I know how this is going to turn out.
00:12:37.540But, you know, there's, I've been, I've been sort of gauging the temperature and the response.
00:12:43.420And, you know, the response from the mainstream media has just been breathless.
00:12:47.300You know, they're furious because after I did that, you know, there was about half a dozen independent journalists that asked really, really prickly questions.
00:12:56.620And I'm wondering if there's, like, if there's a sweet spot here where we can ask questions that are serious, that our viewers want answers to, that would never be asked by the mainstream media but aren't so stinging that they'll let us back in so we can keep doing it.
00:13:15.360Because it's not so much about the stunt every four years.
00:13:20.440And if we're able to ask them in a professional way that even when the viewers see it, they say, yeah, you know, that's a fair question.
00:13:27.540And that's honestly been, I mean, there's some crazy liberals that have been saying Kean shouldn't be allowed near a microphone anywhere, which, you know, they're never going to change their mind.
00:13:35.360But these moderates, these centerists are saying, well, you know, Kean's question actually was pretty legitimate given, you know, I could list the questions that I had prepared that I could have asked and they would have stung.
00:13:45.980But I decided that this was probably better and I'm glad that we did because, you know, maybe if we can build a relationship with Mark, if he wins, I will, you know, we will not survive another four years if we are not able to hold him to account.
00:14:02.180If he, you know, if he's governing this country with just him and Rosemary Barton in the room discussing what Canada needs, we're going to have a really big problem.
00:14:10.460So we need people like Juno News putting a light on him and whatever we need to do to get into these rooms to ask him questions that our viewers and Canadians at large want answers to.
00:14:51.640They were on one of these divisive social issues.
00:14:53.560And I think your point, right, if we lived in a normal country where there was press freedom, True North and Juno News and the Rebel, the Counter Signal, we would be able to ask questions of the leaders day in and day out, right?
00:15:05.400And so our questions wouldn't feel so out of place and they wouldn't be so shocking to people if it was just an everyday occurrence.
00:15:12.720But because we only get one shot at this, like, we're going to make sure that the questions count.
00:15:16.800So here is True North's Alex Zoltan asking Mark Carney how many genders there are and then asking if he supports women-only spaces.
00:15:42.180Do you believe that women, biological women, have the right to their own spaces, their own sports, their own change rooms, their own prisons, their own homeless shelters?
00:15:53.240I think we, this is Canada, and that has a general objective, yes.
00:16:01.580We, but we work in, where we value all Canadians for who they are and we'll continue to do so.
00:16:14.560That was without a doubt the best question of the night.
00:16:17.680That really exposed Mark Carney for who he was.
00:16:20.940I mean, I will say he eventually, at least the first one came to the right thing, he said there's two, which I imagine might be controversial to some on the far left people who support him because they believe that there are, I think someone, didn't someone say that they, someone heckled Alex and said there's 27 genders or something like that?
00:16:37.720Anyway, and then the second question he did not answer.
00:16:40.740He just said, this is Canada, like kind of in theory, yes, but, and I think he's saying in Canada we accept others, meaning that we need to accept men in women's spaces, basically.
00:16:51.100So he, he didn't come to a very good answer there.
00:16:55.640Like I, that was the question that made my phone blow up and people messaging me, friends, former colleagues, people just saying like, thank you, because that is a question that I want to know.
00:17:05.000And that is a question that is important to me as a mother, you know, with daughters and playing sports and all these kinds of things.
00:17:11.020Like these are issues that matter to Canada.
00:17:13.180The journalists don't like it, but, but this is a question that should have been asked to him.
00:17:17.700The thing is this exact question was asked of Pierre Polyev, the exact question.
00:17:27.000Well, I mean, I know why, and I'll, I'll say why it's okay to ask Pierre that because it was coming from the perspective of, you must say that there's some like vague third option of, you know, non-binary, two-spirited queerness that you need to accept right now.
00:17:42.640While I grill you with this important question, that's why that question was okay.
00:17:46.140When Pierre Polyev was asked it, but when it was asked by Alex Zoltan, it was asked from a different perspective.
00:17:51.140Now that the world has sort of woken up from this weird fever dream where they think that there's 27 genders.
00:17:56.200And now it's sort of like culturally appropriate to accept biological reality and know that there is only two.
00:18:02.880And I don't know what the world was thinking for the last half decade.
00:18:06.100Now that he's asking the question from that perspective, it's absolutely outrageous, alt-right, crazy, outrageous that you do that.
00:18:13.540But the average viewer seeing that, there's nothing that could legitimize our cause more than asking these questions in this, in this format right now, which is why the liberals are so furious on Twitter, on Axon, whatever, whatever social media they're using these days when they're coping and seething.
00:18:33.220And you can tell that they are wounded by the questions that we asked because they were so effective, because we had a national audience.
00:18:40.380We did our job and it shows because they're so furious.
00:18:46.160So the CBC was covering the event live.
00:18:48.520You pointed out in our live stream as well, I'll say, you were out in the freezing cold because they wouldn't let you do a call, like a stand-up or an interview from inside the building because the event was hosted at Radio Canada's headquarters, CBC headquarters in Montreal.
00:19:07.780And here is Rosemary Barton calling us a very right-wing website and adding that it was the debates commission, how dare them, that let us in.
00:19:17.040Rosie, I'm curious what stood out to you because at one point when some of those last questions came up, I just checked.
00:19:57.380These people, remember when Don Cherry got cancelled for saying that?
00:20:01.300And there was Rosemary Barton saying it about us.
00:20:04.340The other journalist that she was talking to, Arsenal, I can't remember her name.
00:20:08.460She said that she couldn't believe that it was Canada and that these questions, these divisive social questions, were being asked in Canada.
00:20:17.260And Rosemary Barton said, you know, it was just a few days ago in the UK that the Supreme Court ruled that women are women and men are men, right?
00:20:23.180So this is an important issue around the world.
00:20:25.400You mentioned that Pierre Polyev had that question asked to him.
00:20:28.520I think it was about two months ago or three months ago when President Trump signed an executive order saying men are men and women are women.
00:20:35.300And then he went on CP24, which is a Toronto news station, and the host asked him how many genders there are, right?
00:20:41.160And so that was a legitimate question.
00:20:42.840I want to take us back one year ago in February 2024.
00:20:46.580Danielle Smith in Alberta announced the ban of sex change operations for children.
00:20:51.880And the entire parliamentary press gallery ran to ask Pierre Polyev.
00:20:58.180So I'm just going to play a clip of this scrum.
00:21:00.640Here they all are asking this question of Pierre Polyev just one year ago.
00:21:07.840Do you support age restrictions for puberty blockers and hormone therapies for trans kids?
00:21:14.900I think that Justin Trudeau is trying to divide and distract Canadians by spreading disinformation.
00:21:21.880about the decisions that premiers and parents are making.
00:22:08.820I think that we should protect children and their ability to make adult decisions when they are adults.
00:22:13.820So I just played that clip to show you that the entire parliamentary press gallery, you could hear them all shouting.
00:22:19.820And look, I don't begrudge them for that.
00:22:20.820That is their job as journalists, to ask questions of our leaders.
00:22:23.820But my only question is, why is it okay for the entire parliamentary press gallery to be pressing Pierre Pauliev like that?
00:22:30.820Pushing him, trying to get him, trap him in, answering a question that you could tell he hadn't prepared an answer to.
00:22:36.820And it takes him a while, but eventually he gets there and says, no, children shouldn't have to, shouldn't be allowed to make decisions, you know, for adults.
00:23:14.820They've run the country for decades supporting Justin Trudeau by using this playbook, attack the conservatives on social issues and mask liberal insanity as much as possible by using the tricks of the trade to launch softballs at them that are, you know, you know, what kind of shampoo?
00:23:32.820What kind of shampoo do you use when you're, you have, you're in an airplane with the leader of a G7 country.
00:23:37.820And that's the question you ask him, uh, it's intentional, you know, that that's how they protect Justin Trudeau for a decade.
00:23:43.820And they're hoping for another decade with Mark Carney.
00:23:46.820Uh, and I, I'm not going to play by those rules.
00:23:49.820Uh, and I, I don't think anyone in Juneau is, and, and rebel news and the Western standard and Epoch times.
00:23:55.820I don't think that they're going to do.
00:23:56.820Uh, I don't think that they're going to play by those rules anymore because, uh, the stakes are so high.
00:24:01.820The stakes are so high now and we know what their game is.
00:24:04.820We know what the tricks are that they use.
00:24:06.820And we're going to use, uh, the exact same ones to get answers for our viewers.
00:24:10.820Because at the end of the day, this isn't about a stunt.
00:24:18.820It is about our viewers and Canadians at large and getting them results, which means getting them answers to questions that they can't ask themselves.
00:24:28.820But they're sitting at their dinner table saying, man, you know, I wonder what Mark Carney actually thinks or, or what he, what he would say when he was asked an unscripted question about, you know, should my daughter be able to be guided down this trans pipeline by the school garden guidance counselor?
00:24:46.820Uh, what does Mark Carney actually think about that?
00:24:48.820Uh, the, these Canadians want to know an answer to that and many other questions.
00:24:52.820And, you know, if he wins, we'll have four years to grill him on it.
00:24:55.820I just hope that he's not going to be using, um, the same tricks that Trudeau used to keep us out, which, you know, given his track record during the campaign, I'm not so, um, bullish on, but I guess we'll see it.
00:25:08.820I, we do have a recording of him inviting me.
00:25:10.820So maybe I'll just bring that with me when I go to his press conference.
00:25:16.820Let's go to a bit more of the reaction.
00:25:17.820Here is CBC's David Cochran saying that the debates commission must be accountable for daring to allow us in the door.
00:25:24.820Uh, I, I think the debate commission is going to need to be accountable for what's kind of happening here.
00:25:30.820They moved the time of the debate the day before they kicked the greens out the morning of, and they've opened up the scrums and the press access.
00:25:37.820To a bunch of groups who sometimes are registered charities or have been defined by their owner as not actually a journalistic organization or have been ruled by the federal court to not be a journalistic organization.
00:25:48.820And in an election like this one with very, very substantive debate on very substantive issues, moderated very well and executed very well by all the leaders.
00:26:00.820This is CBC's senior reporter, Ashley Burke, again, saying that the post-debate scrums were dominated by right wing media groups and basically just saying, like, how dare us, how dare us go and ask questions to play that clip.
00:26:13.820The leader spoke post-debate in those scrums.
00:27:45.820I'm told that during the debate itself, they were basically laughing and cheering anytime Pierre Polyev got a tough question and were, like, actively cheering on Mark Carney.
00:27:56.820And then the journalists took their rage from us and shifted it towards the Debates Commission.
00:28:01.820And so here's Andrew Koinonek saying fire every member of the Debates Commission.
00:28:09.820Both both of these are at issue panels.
00:28:11.820She says brought to you by the Debates Commission, a gong show.
00:28:14.820And then you have Chris Selle of the National Post saying this is the end of the Debates Commission banquet.
00:28:22.820And finally, Amanda Rose, who I wasn't familiar with this person, she's an entrepreneur.
00:28:27.820She writes that watching Rebel News and True North ask bad faith questions after the debate is the best argument for public funding of the CBC.
00:28:38.820So just quickly here, Kian, like to folks that don't really understand, like, OK, so this is what happened.
00:28:44.820Prior to Justin Trudeau being prime minister, these debates during the election used to be organized by the private media companies themselves.
00:28:50.820Right. So CTV might do one. Global might do one.
00:28:54.820And basically every media company kind of like offers to organize them.
00:28:57.820And then they see which leaders agree to show up to them.
00:29:00.820Justin Trudeau, as he did for so many other issues, decided that the government needed to be in charge of this, that even though the free market was doing a perfectly fine job doing it, he wanted the government to take over.
00:29:09.820So the government took over and they use that to try to ban independent media.
00:29:13.820And so interestingly, before you and I actually worked together, we teamed up because in 2019 they banned True North Andrew Lawton.
00:29:20.820And then you were working at the Rebel that time and they banned you as well.
00:29:40.820And the judge, a federal judge, ruled in our favor and said the government cannot prevent citizen journalists from asking questions of their leader.
00:30:01.820And so this time around, the Debates Commission just didn't even bother trying to block us.
00:30:05.820They saw the writing on the wall that the courts, the judges, as much as I often disagree with what happens in courts in Canada, this time they got it right.
00:30:14.820They made the right decision saying, in a free society, Canada is still a free society.
00:32:40.820I think that it is going to show, again, that the mainstream media can't be trusted with the truth.
00:32:46.820They can't be trusted to hold leaders accountable because they are built to be machines that siphon grant money away from the federal government.
00:33:13.820They're not going to be let in the question line because only one outlet, like every outlet only gets one question, except for Rebel, which has an exemption.
00:33:20.820I don't think any tough questions are going to be asked by the legacy media, by the mainstream media.
00:33:37.820Because, you know, whatever the weakest point is, they'll find it and they'll exploit it because their goal is to stop Pierre Paulia from winning.
00:33:44.820And our goal is to get answers for Canadians, which is what journalists used to do.
00:33:49.820You know, this is this is sort of like old style journalism where the goal wasn't to persuade people one way or the other.
00:34:03.820Mark Carney's answer on gender spoke for itself.
00:34:06.820Maybe some far left extremists who, you know, were supporting his party because they wanted to stop the Conservatives might realize that, you know, Stephen Harper chose Mark Carney for a reason, because he wasn't some radical SJW.
00:34:20.820And these people who naturally want to support the NDP and these left wing extremist causes, maybe they're going to be dissuaded from it.
00:34:28.820You know, frankly, some people saying that we didn't move the needle at all.
00:34:31.820It's it's they're they're kind of telling on themselves a little bit in the mainstream media that they think that the media's job is to move the dial and is to convince people that, you know, orange man bad, blue man good or red man good.
00:35:46.820Like he said that he was going to continue to support UNRWA, which is a very discredited global aid organization that has been infiltrated by Hamas.
00:35:56.820The framing of the questions themselves were also like everything was focused on Trump.
00:36:01.820And then they spent a very long time talking about the environment when they finally got to talk about immigration.
00:36:05.820The way the question was framed, they literally asked whether Canada should accept refugees from the United States because of Trump.
00:36:14.820Like we have a totally broken immigration system that has been destroyed and pillaged from 10 years of Justin Trudeau.
00:36:18.820That is a root cause of so many other social problems that we have and economic problems in our country.
00:36:23.820And yet the way that CBC debate framed it was literally can people from Haiti who don't feel safe in the United States under President Trump come to Canada.
00:36:32.820It did give Pierre Polyev an opportunity to shine and to point out Mark Carney's radical position with the Century Initiative and 100 million.
00:36:40.820I don't know that many Canadians had heard that before.
00:36:42.820But interestingly, Kian, they've announced that they have removed immigration from the English debate tonight.
00:36:47.820So French Canadians and Quebecers are allowed to talk about immigration.
00:36:53.820And so, you know, this is the thing about these government debates is what they omit is just as important as what they don't,
00:36:59.820which means all the more likely that the independent media asking questions are going to want to go there because the mainstream media censors it and they don't allow these questions to take place.
00:37:08.820So we will be back tonight, folks, 6.30 p.m.
00:37:13.820The English debate starts at 7 p.m. Eastern, and then it will be two hours.
00:37:18.820So the post-debate scrums, that's the part you're going to want to grab your popcorn and tune in to see what kind of questions get put to the leaders.
00:37:27.820I wonder if they'll pull some shenanigans, Kian, to try to prevent the independent press from asking questions of the leader.
00:37:34.820I don't know that they can, but I feel like they're going to try.
00:37:36.820So we're going to want to watch that part, and then we'll be back after all of that with more post-debate analysis.